City of Tomorrow

The Roosevelt Island tram is up and running again after a nine-month makeover, and now “the island nobody knows,” as Philip Johnson once called it, is only three minutes away from midtown, by heated gondola, instead of the old four and a half. With your time saved, check out the new “smart” parking spaces near the landing dock, featuring square sensors embedded in the pavement, for monitoring overstays and, ideally, for delivering real-time vacancy alerts to the iPhones of circling drivers. The city of tomorrow, at last!

Of course, there were never supposed to be circling drivers, according to the island’s master plan, as conceived forty years ago by Johnson and his partner John Burgee. There was to be no need for street parking, either. If you were arriving by bridge, from Queens, you’d simply deposit your car at Motorgate, the brutalist garage above what is now Gristede’s, and wait for a red electric bus to shuttle you north or south. “We pioneered electric buses,” Rosina Abramson, an executive with the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, said the other day, shortly before her retirement party. “But by the time I got here, in 1986, I found the electric buses warehoused, because the batteries took twenty-four hours to charge and could only keep a charge for eight hours.” At the northern end of the island, by Lighthouse Park, Abramson found ruts in the grass left by urban explorers who had made a habit of off-roading with their Jeeps. “I actually had bollards installed,” she said. “The whole concept of a traffic-free island had disappeared.”

In keeping with the small-town utopian spirit of the place, Abramson had commandeered a golf cart for her farewell tour, and a visitor could be forgiven for thinking he’d stepped into an urban-planning twilight zone. Here, for instance, was “the last Section 8 building in America.” And there, along the east side of Main Street, was a block-long portico, designed to provide shelter for the elderly—“but it creates a huge wind tunnel.” Abramson made sure to stop at the “garbage factory,” the only one of its kind in the United States, with pneumatic tubes running the length of the island, linking all the residences. “It is the coolest thing,” she said. Meanwhile, the yellow Z-shaped bricks in the road were in danger of sinking, because they’d been laid on a bed of sand. “It was supposed to be a traffic-free island, so it didn’t matter,” she said, with a sigh. “Now we’re constantly replacing them. And the number of people in the world that know how to work with Z-brick is diminishing.”

The golf cart was handling the Z-bricks fine, but the subfreezing temperature was proving to be a little too much to endure. Like many things on the island, the victory lap was a nice idea in theory. Abramson ducked into the local diner for a cup of restorative hot tea, and recalled a group of Buddhist monks who, a couple of decades ago, had tried to convince her that they could levitate the U.N. if only she would let them build a peace pagoda on the island’s southern tip. “They would come and lobby me wearing beautiful saffron robes and sandals, in the dead of winter, and I’d say, ‘Where’s your coat? Put your boots on,’ ” she said, and then she retrieved the keys to an S.U.V. to use for the remainder of the expedition.

Heading south, Abramson passed the landmarked Strecker Laboratory (now an M.T.A. electrical substation) and the buffeted ruins of the old Smallpox Hospital, arriving, finally, at a mound of rubble, where, instead of a peace pagoda, workers were laying the foundation for an F.D.R. memorial designed by Louis Kahn. (The plans were found in his briefcase when he was discovered, dead, on the floor of a bathroom in Penn Station, in 1974.) Next, Abramson identified a stand of cherry trees, along the western shore, which had been planted at the behest of “the doyennes of Sutton Place,” who “hated this view.” Some of the nicest things can’t be planned for.

A bit farther north, another eyesore loomed in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge: a tennis bubble that looked to be a decade overdue for a power wash. “That was supposed to be a sports field, and when I got here it was all fenced off, because mufflers used to fall from the bridge,” Abramson explained. “We developed the notion of finding some material that could withstand things falling from the bridge. So the bubble has parachute material that had been tested by the Army.” Next door was Sportspark, an indoor athletic complex where “the squash courts are unusable because they were built right next to the furnace,” and where the refurbished swimming pool is just seven feet short of the international standard, “so you can’t use it for competitive sports.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.